Outstanding contributions of our faculty, staff, students and alumni

Dear Colleagues-Friends,

Faculty, students and future students are represented in this set of stories. I hope you’ll enjoy learning about their contributions.

• We are proud to see Sally Santen, M.D., Ph.D., senior associate dean for assessment, evaluation and scholarship, will lead the evaluation of the Accelerating Change in In Medical Education Consortium initiative through a contract with the American Medical Association. The consortium schools are working together to develop common solutions in key areas such as health system science, coaching and competency based education. As the grant evaluator, Dr. Santen will work with the AMA team to determine outcomes and publish findings.

• If you’re from a small town, you may have a family doctor who has been present at the most important moments of your life. But what happens to patients when that doctor leaves? That’s what research by the Class of ’21’s Paulius Mui is trying to uncover. “Some people are losing their best friend in that regard. A rural physician really ties together a community,” says the fmSTAT student and future family physician. His idea is to capture patients’ perspectives and use them to inform policy decisions to attract and retain primary care physicians to low-population, sometimes isolated, places.

• Women in Science hosted its 12th annual Girl Scout Science Fun Day, bringing 115 young women to the MCV Campus for a day filled with live demos and hands-on experiments. “I hope that we can spark any interest they have in science and they can see us as women in these roles and know they can do it, too,” says Sarah Thomas, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Pathology and one of the program volunteers.

• Congratulations to the Class of 2019’s Mark Feger whose dissertation research on ankle injury rehabilitation has been honored by the National Athletic Trainers’ Association. That background serves the prospective orthopaedic surgeon well. “Orthopaedic surgeons help people do the things they love,” Feger says. “That means going for a walk or a run, spending time with their families, or going back to their job. We help people maintain their function and do the things they enjoy doing.”
With every good wish,